Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) (17 page)

Those Who Pursued Disintegration Fully

They were injecting cocaine when I came in. They pricked their arms, drew the blood up through the needle, let the blood swirl in the fluid in the barrel, and then pressed the plunger while tipping back their heads. Barry was there, but the other kids in the circle were strangers to me. They didn’t look like students. One of them had ball bearings instead of eyes. Another one had cheeks like sneaker soles, with repeating V shapes stamped into them. I found out why. Before I’d wandered in, the guy had been passed out on a rug woven with the same pattern. They’d revived him by dripping the coke solution on his tongue. Now he was revving. He flicked the fine-gauge needle, clearing it of bubbles, then jabbed himself in the soft crook of his elbow. “Damn right!” he yelled. Then he ran out of the room.

“Your turn,” said Barry.

“It isn’t sterile.”

“I’m holding it over a candle. You’re watching me do it.”

“My mother’s a nurse. That doesn’t work.”

I stayed to help in case someone overdosed. AIDS wasn’t yet a fear, just heart attacks. Barry appeared to have one after he stuck himself, but only a mild one, a tremor. After a lapse into pallor and clamminess, he stuttered back to life. Then we went off on a tear of Marxist rhetoric that only ended when ball-bearing eyes clamped a veiny hand over his mouth. By then, the rest of the users had the jitters. One was facing a wall and running in place. One was bickering with the ghoul beside him about a girl they’d both seduced—together, apparently, on the same night—who was complaining of having caught a bug that the first guy believed came from the ghoul and the ghoul was blaming on a third guy. But they all had it now, this bug, or feared they did. I strained to hear the girl’s name. They talked too fast, though. Then, suddenly, they were talking about music—bands they’d seen and records they’d bought, musicians they’d personally spent time around. I discerned from this that they all came from New York and had known one another, through school, for years and years. Other than that, the only resemblance that I detected among them was a distracted indifference to one another. When the drugs were gone, so were their bonds. Some wind arose that they offered no resistance to and blew them from the room.

I would have to be myself.

M
Y CLOSEST FRIEND AS A JUNIOR WAS V., A PAKISTANI
boy who’d disappointed his family—and even, as he told it, his nation’s leaders—by leaving his intended major, electrical engineering, for philosophy. He claimed that his decision was purely intellectual, but I suspected a social motive. Among the campus’s tastemaking elite, philosophy was in vogue just then, especially the arcane linguistic variety that allowed one to brandish Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
, whereas engineering was deemed unsuitable for anyone other than indentured third worlders whose governments were paying their tuition in return for future work designing missiles and irrigation projects.

This had been V.’s deal. Once he broke it, whether out of conviction or in deference to fashion, he couldn’t go home again. That made two of us.

I met V on one of my rare visits to the labyrinth of open stacks housed in the bombproof trio of subbasements beneath the Firestone Library. The place was designed like an iceberg, with most of its square footage buried and a fortresslike outcropping on top. Standing on the plaza near its entrance, lighting yet another cigarette as a way of postponing going inside, I could imagine a legion of the literate aiming crossbows from the parapets at onrushing armies of hollering barbarians. The confrontation might end in countless casualties, but the books would survive, civilization would endure. Not me, though—I’d probably be slaughtered. Firestone intimidated me, breeding a sort of cultural vertigo whenever I found myself in its vaulted lobby presenting my puny ID card to the guards. When the battle for civilization finally came I’d probably be stranded outside its walls.

I went there that evening not to read but to listen to tapes of illustrious dead poets reciting their best-known works. The tapes were a bit of labor-saving luck that I’d heard about from an older English major who was even lazier than I was. You weren’t allowed to enjoy them in your room, though; you had to consume them in the library, through pairs of gigantic cushioned headphones that might have been surplus from NASA Mission Control. I chose Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell that night because I was in the mood for doomed New Englanders. Plath’s voice, pressured and brutal, frightened me because I could truly imagine her alive, which helped me picture her killing herself, too, while Lowell’s voice was so antique and magisterial that I couldn’t believe he’d ever lived on earth. After hanging the headphones on their hook and signaling the attendant that I was finished, I decided to ride the elevator downstairs and look for a volume of Lowell’s poetry with an author photo on the jacket. I wanted assurance of his materiality.

About an hour later, while waiting in the checkout line to present my dubious credentials as a trustworthy borrower of masterpieces, I fell into a conversation with V., whom I found instantly engaging. He was the first brown person I’d ever spoken to on an approximately equal basis, and I liked the slim symmetries of his face and figure. I also liked the way he dressed. His dark V-necked sweater, though slightly pilled and stretched into shapelessness at the cuffs and hem, seemed effortlessly collegiate. His black shoes were stout and nicely scuffed. His pants were proper pants, not jeans. He dressed as I fancied the young Lowell had dressed, and as I wished I dressed, with offhand British elegance.

Immanuel Kant was the topic that broke the ice for us. My knowledge of the impeccable old German came from a philosophy class whose internationally respected professor taught that Kant, with his clockwork daily strolls and monastic temperament, was the last in a line of ambitious eminences who’d sought to “ground” ethics, morals, and metaphysics in a realm of changeless “authenticity.” Kant had almost succeeded in this feat, but the fact that he hadn’t proved, said the professor, that the whole endeavor was futile and ought to be abandoned for the pursuit of a humbler form of wisdom: “the conversation.” This was fine with me. Never did I consider it bad news when someone who’d devoted decades to mastering a knotty subject reported that the subject, in the end, wasn’t worth devoting decades to.

Our chat about Kant saw V and me across the Firestone plaza to Nassau Street and down the staircase of the Annex. We found a table near a wall, close enough to the crowd to feel its warmth but far away enough to hear each other speak. I felt invigorated in V’s company. Whatever the schools were like in Pakistan, they clearly did a better job than ours in instilling analytic agility and at least the beginnings of erudition. Given no more than a phrase (“the conversation,” say), V could cite a set of classical precepts that were both plausible and graspable, good for hours of heightened interaction. I felt, in his company as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to real enlightenment. And I felt flattered when he listened to me. Here was a young man who represented the best of the best of an entire country—of an entire
people
, as I saw it—and I was holding his attention.

Drugs played no part in our relationship. Ours were purely sober colloquies, fueled by aspiration and affection. We walked through the leaves, past sunlit spires of stone, attacking the roots of language and understanding with hatchets of iron skepticism. Reality softened around us. We came to regard ourselves as lonely Nietzscheans who’d cast off thick veils of prejudicial nonsense and emerged as unencumbered wills. “I’m leaning over. I’m picking up this rock. I could throw it,” I said, “and break that window, but instead I’ll hold on to it. Because I’m free.”

Later that fall we sat by a canal and watched the crew team row past in its trim vessels. By then we’d declared ourselves “phenomenologists.” I wasn’t sure what this required of us besides a refusal to meet the gazes of students who were still mired in what we termed, dismissively, as “consensual certitude.”

“After you graduate,” I said, “how long will they let you stay in the U.S.?”

“Indefinitely, I hope. Provided, of course, that I find secure employment or continue with my studies.”

I nodded, chilled. I’d given not a single thought, I realized, to the question of what I might do once I left Princeton.

“I’d like to teach someday,” V. said. He reached for an acorn, pried its cap off, and tossed it into the canal—another one of our little shows of freedom.

“What subject?” I asked him. “Philosophy?”

“Perhaps. Though I’m not convinced it can be taught. Philosophy may be over. You?” he said.

“Maybe poetry.”

“Teach it?”

“No, just write it.”

“For whom? For what sort of audience?”

This stumped me. I sat on the grass and watched the boats slide past.

“I’m sorry,” said V.

“It’s fine.” I fingered an oak twig.

“All poets have the same audience. The Silence.”

O
ne keen winter night we set out down Prospect Avenue with the intention of crashing a party at one of the eating clubs that wouldn’t have us. The spring before, in a process known as “bicker,” the five remaining selective clubs—Ivy, Cottage, Tiger, Colonial, and Cap and Gown—had interviewed and chosen new members. This ritual had occurred without my knowledge. I only found out about bicker afterward, when I glimpsed a Joy Division friend of mine crossing a quad one afternoon with a pair of hearty-looking new pals. I made inquiries. I learned that my friend now belonged to the Tiger Club, the ale-drenched, reactionary redoubt of Princeton’s most stalwart young misogynists. Not only was the all-male Tiger fighting a headline-making lawsuit against a rejected aspirant named Sally, but a number of its members had been implicated in the unwitting videotaping of a drunken female guest during a sex act that might have been coerced. That someone I knew had sought favor with such brutes shocked and astonished me at first, but I couldn’t blame him once I’d thought about it. They’d made him feel wanted, apparently.

V seemed serene about having been shut out by the campus’s high-society gatekeepers. He took his meals in a campus dining hall with a trio of other students from the subcontinent, as he’d taught me to call his geographic homeland, while I’d joined the bitterly nonconformist Terrace Club, home to Princeton’s proudest rejects. Though the nearly bankrupt Terrace took all comers, we (the wounded seventeen of us who ate beneath its leaking roof and danced on its warped linoleum floors) considered it exclusive anyway. We construed the fact that the place conferred no status to mean that status didn’t concern us, which made us rare individuals indeed. I subsidized my membership by working part-time in the club’s anarchic kitchen, helping concoct inexpensive meatless meals at the direction of the stoned head chef, most of whose dishes were inspired by recipes in the
Moosewood Cookbook
, a best-selling guide to taste-free dining. Assisting me in the task of blending hummus and garnishing it with sprouts was Edmond, a neo-pagan extrovert who liked to strip naked when the room got hot, exposing the food to casual contamination by his freely streaming armpit sweat and abundant body hair. Far from regarding this practice as unsanitary, Edmond believed it to be nourishing, since food, as he told me many times, ought to absorb the spirits of its preparers.

On the way to the party V. and I talked Wittgenstein, loudly, so others could hear us in the dark. “
Whereof one cannot
speak, thereof one must be silent
.” We also debated “the purpose of love.” V. held that love had no purpose—love just
was
—while I asserted that its purpose was to induce in the lover a condition of “dual-beholding,” whatever that might be. Girls went by as we spoke, but not a lot of them, and few who were available to our kind. Just twelve years after Princeton had gone coed, the campus gender ratio still favored males by a considerable margin, placing a premium on pretty women that only rich boys and quarterbacks could pay. Our shape-shifting, agile, approval-seeking brains may have entitled us to live and study with the children of the ruling class, but not to mate with them.

This was the system’s great flaw, and it enraged us. A pure meritocracy, we’d discovered, can only promote; it can’t legitimize. It can confer success but can’t grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to overthrow.

So far, the experiment hadn’t worked.

Somehow we slipped past the door into a room jammed with handsome, arrhythmic dancers wearing a unisex wardrobe of khaki trousers and pastel polo shirts with turned-up collars. A few of them danced as couples, shouting at each other over the music and tossing their heads back in showy gaiety, but most of them aimed their movements at the whole group. When V and I tried to join the fun, the crowd contracted and squeezed us out in a kind of collective immune response. V wandered off somewhere, but I persevered, managing finally to find a gap in the jiggling collective. After being battered by the broad chest of a red-faced, hostile-looking athlete with a much-autographed cast on his right arm, I retreated to a smaller hole. I fixed a lunatic smile on my face and bopped to the beat in perfect isolation, thinking that if I kept the act up long enough someone would let me be her partner.

It didn’t happen. All female backs stayed turned. I slunk off to the professionally staffed bar, and in no time I was drunk and plotting revenge.

I targeted a girl with pearl earrings whose solid, columnar figure, husky voice, and rubber-banded sheaf of wheaty hair held no physical attraction for me but aroused my inner revolutionary. Like a frustrated stableboy in an old novel, I wanted to seduce and ruin her. Amazingly, we ended up alone on the floor of an empty upstairs room. The girl lay under me in a white bra heavily armored with wires and foam padding. She kissed me with an aggressive suction that actually drew blood from my chapped lips. She tugged at my zipper and uttered bold obscenities. Her passion was frank, elemental, and overwhelming, permitting me no illusion of domination. I was servicing a fair-haired warrior goddess, bred to lead and to give birth to leaders.

But she was drunker than I knew; as the act began in earnest, she fell asleep—a total power outage. Should I press on? Here was a chance to vent a primal fury on a symbol of everything that tortured me.

I couldn’t do it. I fled downstairs, found V, and made him leave with me. On the walk back to his room he said, “What assholes.”

“We’re just as bad,” I said. I didn’t explain.

We sobered up in V.’s room by drinking coffee. As he tended to when pressured by strong emotion, he launched into one of his disquisitions on language, and I chimed in with my own thoughts now and then, though my mind was on the girl back at the club. V.’s point, I gathered, was his usual one: words referred to other words, not to the world, and the finest, grandest words, such as “nature” and “God,” referred to nothing. Or maybe I misunderstood. It hardly mattered. It had been years since I’d known what I was talking about, and I no longer expected such conversations to be conclusive or enlightening. They were catechisms, incantations. They reminded me of a short-lived high-school class in which we’d tried to learn German phonetically by repeating sentences from tapes.